Priority is claimed from Provisional Application No. 60/130,764, filed Apr. 23, 1999.
This invention relates generally to a system solution to design, produce, and deliver effective statements and bills in a customer""s chosen media in the most efficient way possible and to make them available to all appropriate internal and external business processes.
The statement and bills application is arguably the largest variable data application in the world. It is singularly responsible for the most of the printing systems products installed by all vendors today. Virtually every business especially financial services firms provide their customers bills and or statements every month.
Telecommunications and Utilities firms also provide billions of pages of bills every month to their customers. Customers have large investments and expenses devoted to paper based systems to produce and mail statements, printers, people, mail equipment postage, paper are all examples. Bills and statements are a primary means of today""s businesses to reach customers on a regular basis. This is primarily due to the fact that bills and statements are one of the few documents that a customer can be trusted to read every month. Industries such as the financial institutions, securities industry, utilities, and telecommunications, are major users of high speed, high volume print services to deliver individual customer bills each and every month. These industries which are typically very conservative, are undergoing a dynamic change in the way they do business in an environment of high competition, profitability, new products, and renewed customer service and loyalty.
The ability to modify statements and bills and the processes and systems surrounding them can cause increased customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty; mail processing costs can be reduced, customer call center costs can also be reduced, customers can be encouraged to try new products and services, and to boost brand recognition and image. In addition, an ability to introduce one to one marketing solutions into some customer engagements can allow progressive companies to communicate better with more sophisticated customers to offer better products and services. The ability to offer customers the option of having their statements and bills delivered in a format most desirable to the customer is also a big advantage and a good first step to build customer loyalty and satisfaction for many of these industries.
It is therefore desirable to have a system in which communications can be improved with customers to strengthen the customer/supplier relationship. It is further desirable to enable bills and statements to become marketing tools and to have the ability to cross-sell additional services and products to specific targeted individuals. It is further desirable to improve productivity by lowering costs in both the delivery method and the processing times, and further to shorten cycle times for both bill and statement generation.
In accordance with one aspect of the present invention, there is provided a customer document management system, comprising customer information stored on a mainframe computer, said customer information being updateable from multiple sources, a data consolidator operating on said customer information to compile customer documents including data reconfiguration into a customer document output database, multiple format output devices driven from the customer document output database.
In accordance with another aspect of the invention herein there is provided A method of creating variable format customer documents comprising storing customer information on a mainframe computer, said customer information being updateable from multiple sources, transmitting said customer information to a consolidating device to reconfigure the customer information into a customer document output database and creating variable format customer documents based on customer preferences from the customer document output database.